I grew up in Japan, surrounded by spaces that were quiet and considered in ways I took for granted as a kid. Not the grand ones — the everyday ones. A machiya organized around a narrow interior garden. A tea room where every dimension had been arrived at for a reason. You notice that as a child without knowing what you're noticing.

The architects I keep returning to work at a similar scale. Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo, whose practice was built on studying everyday Japanese domestic architecture — the modest house, the narrow lot, the considered small thing. Mason St. Peter in LA, where the material decisions are always visible and always earned.

After a decade leading product and design teams, I came to building with a specific set of obsessions: how systems hold together, how early decisions echo through everything that follows, how the choices that seem small at the start are usually the ones that matter most. My graduate work in sustainable energy systems gave me a technical lens to go alongside the aesthetic one — materials, thermal performance, how a building functions from the inside out. I'm a licensed general contractor in Oregon.

Kindred is that thing. A design-build studio in Portland, currently focused on custom saunas and expanding into ADUs, studios, and homes. The same sensibility throughout: natural materials, considered proportions, nothing added that doesn't earn its place. I hold the full process — design, permitting, construction, finishes — because the person who draws it should be the same person who builds it.

If you have a project in mind, let’s chat.